For off his chops or worse, till clogs start popping.
His days are free from threat and subjugation.
Yes, true, he cannot go fat diamond shopping—
Neither can most Type A’s with prime positions
In other people’s companies. Be wiser,
IT geeks, massage therapists, opticians.
Hear this unsackable careers adviser:
No shares, no benefits and bonus package
Could ever be an adequate incentive
For the precarity, the freedom lackage.
Go it alone instead, and be inventive.
Dear friend, you deserve all good things and better.
You know how much I love you and admire you.
Obey this next instruction to the letter:
Never work for someone who can fire you.
Large, it’s obviously a stretch to say that anyone who rates that poem highly enough to frame it could also commit a murder no coroner could detect, but I don’t know. There’s just something about it that’s a bit crazy. You can’t go round telling people never to get a job again, can you? What are they supposed to live on? My wife, Flo, agrees. She’s successful herself as an entrepreneur (she runs a really successful catering business), but she’s the first to admit 99 percent of start-ups fail, so it’s unavoidable that some people have to have jobs. Some of us even like our jobs and want to keep them. Also, why did Corinne Sullivan keep getting fired? What if the dimwits referred to in the bit below the title sensed there was something off about her?
All right, this next section, not crushed into a ball but also not attached to any specific part of the story in an obvious way, is all about what’s referred to throughout as the Gardenia Incident. It’s abit weird, this one, because of the way it’s written. Sally must be the “I,” as you’ll see, and her father the “Dad,” but unlike all the other Sally bits, this one isn’t all “Sally/she” and written in the present tense. It’s written in the exact style of all the other past tense bits that aren’t Sally. (I mean…unless they are, if you see what I mean, Large. Who knows who wrote any of it, really?)
Anyway, make of this what you will:
Gardenia (my heading)
It took me ages to work out that it stuck in my mind not because it was Dad’s worst tantruming bout or anything like that but because it was the best proof. The Gardenia story would be the one to tell if I wanted to convince anyone that I’m right about him, and Mum and Vicky are wrong. The Gardenia Incident didn’t begin with me defying him, rebelling, complaining, or even inconveniencing him in the slightest. I’d done nothing anyone sane would consider wrong or provocative. I was only thirteen, too, so still completely under his power.
We’d just got back from a three-week-long summer holiday that had turned me a deep, dark brown. I didn’t know anything then about how to stop your skin from peeling, and soon after we got back to England, I noticed that the skin on both my calves was dry and scaly. Bits started to flake off. Oonagh told me it looked disgusting and I said, “What am I supposed to do, though? I suppose eventually the horrid bits will fall off.” She laughed and said, “Don’t be silly. Just put on some moisturizer or body lotion. If you’d done that from the start, you could have kept your tan for longer.”
That evening I pulled out a gift set my grandma had bought me the previous Christmas that I still hadn’t used, a collection of gardenia-scented toiletries: body lotion, bubble bath, and a wrapped soap. I put a little bit of the body lotion on one of my legs and was astonished by the difference it made. I couldn’t wait to show Oonagh the next day; the scaly lines had disappeared and that patch of my left calf looked and smelled great—shiny and healthy. My next move was obvious: cover both calves with the stuff, and my problem would be solved.
I was in the process of doing this when my bedroom door opened and my father walked in. He started to tell me something—I can’t remember what—but stopped mid-sentence when he saw what I was doing. His face stiffened in disapproval, and I didn’t understand why he was acting as if he’d caught me injecting heroin into my eyeballs.
“What the hell is that?” he demanded. I explained quickly—anything to make the horrible hardness in his eyes disappear. At thirteen, I knew what it meant: between hours and days of tight-lipped, hostility-radiating silence interspersed with long bouts of berating and bellowing. I remember thinking he would definitely say something along the lines of “Oh, right, that’s fine, then,” once he understood.
He didn’t. Instead, he swore under his breath, shook his head in disgust, and left the room, slamming the door hard. I can’t remember if I immediately ran after him and started apologizing or if I first spent a few minutes wondering what exactly I’d done to displease him, but I recall very clearly sitting on the sofa in his study while he sat at his desk and roared at me: “I don’t understand what’shappening to you! You used to read books and care about serious things! Now you’ve turned into someone who wastes her time on beautifying herself! All you want to do is make yourself look like some dolly bird! You’re only thirteen! Why do you need to put lotion on your legs? You’re a child!”
Normally my only option in such situations was to say, “Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry,” over and over again until he calmed down, having got the poison out of his system. It was important to try and do this without crying, too, because when I cried, it made him angrier. “What are you crying for?” he would yell. “I’m the one who should be crying!”
This time, though, I thought I had a defense worth stating more than once. I was sure dry, scaly legs that needed moisturizing because they were actually sore fell into the category of a health issue rather than anything to do with vanity, but Dad brushed it aside, saying that whether on this occasion I’d been caring too much about my appearance or not didn’t matter; in general and overall, I had been displaying all kinds of attitudes recently that he found disappointing. My priorities and interests were all wrong, and it was terrible that I used to be better and was now so much worse. Those weren’t his exact (shouted) words, but that was the gist.
Eventually, the only way I could stop the verbal onslaught was to employ my usual defensive strategy: endlessly apologize until the rage cloud had passed. By dinnertime Dad had cheered up and Mum seemed cheery enough too, though she’d heard it all. I’m sure I was in good spirits too; it was always worth celebrating when the turmoil finally ended, and never worth commenting, in theopinion of everyone around our kitchen table, on the extended psychological-intimidation ordeal that had just taken place.
***
That’s it for the Gardenia stuff, Large. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I know the coroner says no murder took place, but someone who’s been bullied like that by a parent for most of her life? Someone who’s been trained, and trained herself, to keep her own pain under wraps at all costs while apologizing to her tormentor?
